


eYEs weAry

by Antimoany



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Bad Time Sans, Bad Time Simulator, I really am about to start a whole AU huh, Meta, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, POV Sans (Undertale), POV Second Person, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23817259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antimoany/pseuds/Antimoany
Summary: You aren't the only one having a bad time.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	1. Prologue

“ready?” He asked, as though he didn't already know the answer.

You'd been at this for some time now. All evidence indicated you were not, in fact, ready. 

But you knew what he meant; you told him you were.

You dodged the first barrage of bones with practised ease. Sans responded by throwing every Gaster Blaster he can summon at you, at once. You'd been fighting him for so long you knew where the hits were going to land, and you knew how to position yourself to avoid him. Centre, up, centre, up. The familiar pattern played out through sheer muscle memory.

“here we go.” Sans opined. _Yeah_ , you thought, _here we go_.

He danced a little. Full of energy, ready for anything. You took that little jig as your cue. You always have; you're conditioned by it.

You feel like you're going to have a bad time.

Your heart beat to Sans' rhythm, and you took your first swing. You didn't expect it to hit, and he dodged just as you anticipated.

“what? you think i'm just gonna stand there and take it?” He winked. Oh, you knew he wouldn't.

You were dancing, too. Dancing around more bones, jumping _just enough_ to clear the ones sweeping beneath your feet; jump too high, and the massive bones hanging above you would knock you clean out. You followed the rhythm, and he gave up on the idea, leaving you unscathed...but with a sense of unease.

You felt your sins crawling on your back.

Another swing; another miss; and you took a breath to feel the beat, barely paying attention to what Sans had to say.

“our reports showed a massive anomaly in the timespace continuum.” He droned in those deep tones you're familiar with. “timelines jumping left and right, stopping and starting...”

More bones flew at you, another familiar pattern. Huge, blue lengths of them. You daren't move a muscle as they passed over you, tense for the upcoming jump. Smaller bones, white. It only took a small hop to clear them. Again, you daren't go too high; if you were still in the air when the next blue bone came your way, you were doomed.

You felt your sins crawling on your back.

You attacked without thinking; he dodged without thinking.

“until suddenly, everything ends.” Sans continued his monologue as though you weren't even fighting. He threw more bones at you effortlessly, in varying lengths, from above _and_ below. Some of them were very tall. You found it hard to jump just so, to clear the lower bones without impaling yourself on those above.

Aptly, everything _did_ end. You leapt with a little too much energy, and were summarily clipped by the gnarled end of a femur. You briefly felt Sans' Karma eating into you before everything reset.

FAILED

The beat stopped. The silence was deafening.

“ready?” Sans asked, as though he didn't already know the answer.

 _No_ , you thought, _I need a break_. You got up from your computer, taking your empty coffee mug with you. On your way to the kitchen, two thoughts prevailed:

First, that the almost universal agreement within the fandom that Sans drinks copious amounts of black coffee never quite sat right with you. Sure, you get it. He's tired, he's a scientist. He has a lot of work to do and not enough time. But surely a monster like him would have better, more magical ways of obtaining energy beyond the borrowed time that comes from caffeine.

Heh, borrowed time. Your second notion, which had been nagging at you for some time now: How would Sans feel, if he were trapped in the Bad Time Simulator? What would it feel like to experience practice mode from his perspective? The constant resets, the battle ending every time he gets a hit in...

That's worse than the kind of torture Chara put him through. A worse fate than Geno's. Stuck in a void, knowing nothing but fighting, segments of fights, never knowing victory.....but often knowing failure.

You sat back down to him, still asking if you're ready, coffee in hand.

“Am I ever ready?” You asked. He didn't answer. Your hand hovered over ENTER.

A horrible thought struck you: Bad Time Simulator was lifted straight from Undertale itself. Modifications like practice mode were added by the creator, but, in many ways, that really was Sans. That's Sans' code, isolated from the rest of Undertale, just _lifted_ from a timeline and dumped into a void....

A worse fate than Geno...

You're not the only one having a bad time.

_An Unspecified Amount of Time Later..._

Images of hackers hunched over keyboards in darkened rooms always brought a tired kind of amusement to you. You didn't know _anyone_ who worked like that. It's bad for your back and your eyes...the two things anyone with computer-oriented work needs to keep an eye on.

No, you sat in a well-lit room, curtains open. You would turn your head and look out of the window on occasion, at the setting or rising sun, or the moon. Leaning against the tilted back of your chair, you had one leg up on the desk, foot on the mousepad. The other, under the desk, foot on one of the feet of your chair. You had balanced your keyboard awkwardly across your splayed lap. It rocked a little as you typed, because the numpad stuck out to your right, dangling over open air. You worked with the rocking, holding a finger stiff and allowing the keyboard to swing up just enough to press a key for you.

Programming always felt a bit beyond you. And hacking? Understanding programming so well that you know _just_ how to break it? Impossible.

You'd probably been trying this for a little too long. This wasn't your forte, so you'd had to pick up a lot of awkward tricks along the way. But every time you felt like giving up, Toby Fox's words would echo in your head like Professor Oak: 

“If there's anything you want to learn, don't be stopped by thinking it'll be too hard! Try it! Game-making, music, art, language, anything!”

Those words...they filled you with DETERMINATION.

You could only hope your message got through.


	2. Hello, Sans!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baby hacker uses their first terminal command with phenominal success.

Somewhere, in an inky black void, Sans the Skeleton stood alone. His hands in his pockets, his head buzzing like a hive of hornets. He had...inklings. Images. Concepts. Like half-forgotten dreams, his memories receded the harder he grasped for them. Most of what he _could_ remember seemed like an endless fight, but he remembered it out of order.

Flashes of a knife he would effortlessly dodge, until, sometimes...

He wouldn't.

Images of some enemy he could never quite hold in his mind, only remain aware of peripherally.

Summoning all his power to crush them, blast them, bury them under a pile of bones....

Again and again and again.

He closed his eyes, trying to piece it together. He was _so tired_. If only he could rest, for just a moment...

Sans opened his eyes. Something wasn't right.

* tch. nothing's right about this.

Something was _different_.

Floating in the void were some words he'd never seen before. And they weren't even in a text box. In neon green, surrounded by jagged pixels:

Hello, Sans!

He blinked. Who was talking to him? Who put that there, a literal neon sign greeting him? A feeling rose up, and while it felt viscerally familiar, Sans couldn't place it. He couldn't remember ever feeling this before, and yet, it felt as though he had.

* h- hey there.

Could they understand him? Who was it? Did they know him? They knew his name. That was something, right?

More text appeared, pushing the previous message upwards to make room for itself:

Did you just answer me?

What a strange question. Was he not supposed to?

* no.

Another message, shoving the last two up:

You did!

* you're imagining things.

Was he arguing with words in the fucking void?

* you've snapped, sans.

The neon was eager to disagree:

No, you haven't! I'm real!

* sheesh. you end every sentence with an exclamation mark?

No! I'm just excited.

He chuckled at that, wondering how much restraint it took to include that final full stop.

* hey, look at that! you're branching out. now who are you? why can't I see you? what are you doing h-

The neon cut him off:

It's a long story.

Yeah, he bet it was. Sans gestured at the void.

* i've got time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic takes the bullshit approach to hacking. I wrote it for a bit of fun, and spending thirteen hours researching one sentence...not only is that not fun, it's the leading cause of fic death. It deals with an inherently fantastical subject anyway, so I saw no harm in being ridiculous about it.
> 
> In case you hadn't guessed by now, this will not be taking itself very seriously.

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up at two AM today and leapt out of bed wide-eyed with the burning need to write this fic.
> 
> This fic is based on/around the [Bad Time Simulator](https://jcw87.github.io/c2-sans-fight/), a git that simulates San's boss fight either altogether or piecemeal, allowing the user to practice whatever they _need_ to practice to be able to beat him in Undertale....or just play it infinitely for fun.
> 
> I have no idea when or how often this will update. I have a lot of projects on the go including some completed projects that I just haven't uploaded.
> 
> And yet, this is what I chose to focus on today.
> 
> It's seven AM folks!! I need a shower.


End file.
